Part 1 (1/2)

MYTH AND RITUAL.

IN.

CHRISTIANITY.

ALAN W. WATTS.

GROVE PRESS, INC.

PREFACE.

ONE of the special delights of my childhood was to go and see the cases of illuminated ma.n.u.scripts in the British Museum, and to walk, as every child can, right into their pages-losing myself in an enchanted world of gold, vermilion and cobalt arabesques, of palaces, gardens, landscapes and skies whose colours were indwelt with light as if their sun shone not above but in them. Most marvelous of all were the many ma.n.u.scripts mysteriously ent.i.tled Books of Hours, since I did not know how one kept hours in a book. Their t.i.tle pages and richly ornamented initials showed scenes of times and seasons-ploughing in springtime, formal gardens bright in summer with heraldic roses, autumn harvesting, and logging in winter snow under clear, cold skies seen through a filigree screen of black trees. I could only a.s.sume that these books were some ancient device for marking the pa.s.sage of time, and they a.s.sociated themselves in my mind with sundials in old court, yards upon hot afternoons, with the whirring and booming of clocks in towers, with astrolabes engraved with the mysterious signs of the Zodiac, and-above all-with the slow, cyclic sweep of the sun, moon and stars over my head.

I could see that these books were somehow connected with the wonderful recurrence of interesting seasons with strange names-Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Whit sun, Trinity, Michaelmas-names which marked the rotation of the calendar, and lent a kind of form and music to the simple succession of days. Under all this was a fascination with time itself, with the fact that the seasons and the heavenly bodies went on and yet round, and that men observed their changes with a ceremony of signs and numbers and bells. I had no sense of the pa.s.sage of time as a running out of life wherein everything gets later and later, until too late. I had no z z Myth and Ritual in Christianity.

feeling of it as a going on and on in an ever upward flight to some ultimate consummation. I simply marveled at the way in which it went round, again and again for ever, so that the marking of time seemed to be the proper and wholly absorbing ritual with which one watched over eternity.

Of course the ”Books of Hours” contained, not the mysteri, ous hours of time themselves, but the socalled Day Hours of the Breviary, the seasonal ritual of the Work of G.o.d whereby, day after day and year after year, the Catholic Church relives the life of Time's redeemer and creator. And this cyclic reenactment is the surest sign that the Christ/story is not primarily an event which happened some two thousand years ago, but something perennial, both in all time and beyond all time. As the changing miracle of the seasons brightens the mere march of days, so Time itself is delivered from mere inanity by being lived sub specie aeternitatis, under the shape of eternity.

In so far, then, as the inner life of Christianity-the contempla. tion of G.o.d-is not just the reverent remembering of a past history, but the recurrent celebration and reliving of a timeless truth, it is possible for us to discuss the Christian story as something much more profound than mere facts which once happened, to give it not only the status of history but also the tremendous dignity of myth, which is ”once upon a time” in the sense that it is behind all time.

Yet, in a relatively short book, such a discussion presents a formidable problem of selection, because it is a subject for which our materials and sources are almost too rich and too vast. Thus in the following approach to the Christian story, every reader will discover that important aspects of the theme have been left out or inadequately treated. For the problem is not merely that the materials are so mult.i.tudinous; it is also that many of them are so familiar. There is, for example, no point in retelling Bible stories which everyone knows already, or, at least, can easily refer to in the inimitable language of the Preface 3 Bible itself. There is an immense quant.i.ty of material, such as the Graal legends and the miraculous lives of the saints, which might have been included in a book of this kind but which would have blurred the clear outline of the essential narrative upon which Christianity is founded.

In order to discuss that narrative in such a way as to present it clearly without merely rewriting the relevant parts of the Bible, and, at the same time, to bring out its profound mytho logical significance, it seemed best to describe it in terms of liturgy rather than history. For the most part, then, this book will a.s.sume that the reader has a general knowledge of the Old and New Testament narratives, and, like a Missal or Book of Hours, will present Christianity as the ritual reliving of the Christ-story through the seasonal cycle of the ecclesiastical year. This has the special advantage of being the form in which Christianity is actually lived, today as yesterday, enabling us to study it as a living organism rather than a dead fossil. Furthermore, it is the perfect form in which to discuss Christianity as a process for the ”redemption of time”, the dimension of life which is so strangely problematic for Western man.

Even with these limitations upon the material to be used, the subject is endless. It is not only that Christian liturgy and ritual have been so richly embellished through the centuries with art and architecture, poetry and symbolism. It is also that each single element, each symbol, each image, each figure of speech and action which the liturgy employs is connected with such a wealth of a.s.sociations, of history, and of mythological parallels, that at every step one is tempted to go off on fascinating digressions which would interfere with the orderly unfolding of the main story. This accounts for a rather considerable use of footnotes in the following pages, and I trust that the reader will take them, not as an annoying apparatus of pedantry, but as hints of the marvelous complexity of branches, twigs, and leaves which spring from a peculiarly fertile Tree of Life.

4 Myt , and Ritual in Christianity.

Because my subject is not a museum piece but a living symbolism which lies at the roots of our present civilization, and is inseparably bound up with our whole philosophy of life, I cannot possibly treat its mythological aspects from a purely ”folklorist” or anthropological point of view. Chris, tian mythology” cannot be studied without bringing in its many implications of a theological, metaphysical, and psychological character, so that I do not feel it necessary to apologize for the fact that a book devoted to a particular form of myth and ritual has also the aspect of a philosophical essay.

ALAN W. WATTS.

American Academy of Asian Studies, San Francisco, 1953.

PROLOGUE.

A BOOK on Christian Mythology has not, I believe, been written before. There are some sound reasons for this omission, for the subject is one of extreme delicacy and complexity, not because of the actual material, but because the whole problem is, in a very special way, touchy. There are extreme differ, ences of violently held opinion about Christianity itself-both as to what it is, and as to whether or not it is a good thing”. Similarly, there are rather wide differences as to the nature and value of Mythology, which has only quite recently become a subject of serious study. But when one takes the two together, one is doing something best expressed by the colloquialism sticking ones neck out”-and sticking it out very far.

To begin with, what is Christianity? On this matter there is no common agreement. Does it consist of the teaching of Jesus, or of the teachings of the Church about Jesus, or of both, and, if so, whose versions of the teachings of Jesus, and which Church ? There is simply no way of making a decision on these questions so as to please everyone. Furthermore, because all Western peoples are so closely involved with the Christian s tradition, it is quite impossible to be ”scientifically objective” about it, for we do not stand at a convenient ”cultural distance” from Christianity. If one attempts to be objective, one is automatically pigeonholed with the liberals as distinct from the ”orthodox, and thus gets into a rut in the very effort to get out of one.

Therefore, in order to get into the subject at all without volumes of preliminary argumentation, a decision must be made, and it will of necessity be somewhat arbitrary. This book starts, then, from the avowedly arbitrary position that Christianity is contained in the teachings and traditions of the Catholic Church, both Roman and Eastern Orthodox. Perhaps this decision is not quite arbitrary, for the author is neither a Christian nor a Catholic in any ”party” sense of these words. The basis for the decision is twofold. On the one hand, the Catholic tradition is both the largest and the oldest Christian tradition, and seems to have had the greatest cultural influence. On the other hand, it is the richest in mythological content.

This brings us to the second problem: what is Mythology? To use this word in its popular sense, and to put it in the same phrase as the word ”Christianity is to invite immediate protest from almost every variety of Christian orthodoxy. For the majority of Catholics and Protestants will insist that everything really important in Christianity is not myth, but history and fact. The orthodoxies do, of course, debate a number of minor, and a smaller number of major, points of factual truth. Protestants, for example, do not agree that the a.s.sumption of the Virgin Mary is an historical event, and Catholics will not insist on the historicity of all the legends about the Wood of the Cross. But debates of this nature will not concern us here, for in this book we are going to treat of the entire body of Catholic tradition without making any dis tinctions as between fact and fancy. In the sense of the word taken by this book, the whole tradition is ”mythological”.

For the word ”myth” is not to be used here as meaning ”untrue or unhistorical”. Myth is to be defined as a complex of stories-some no doubt fact, and some fantasy-which, for various reasons, human beings regard as demonstrations of the inner meaning of the universe and of human life. Myth is quite different from philosophy in the sense of abstract concepts, for the form of is always concrete-consisting of vivid, sensually intelligible; narratives, images, rites, ceremonies, and symbols. A great deal of myth may therefore be based on historical events, but not all such events acquire the mythic character. No one has based any type of cult or religion upon the undoubted fact that Dr. Samuel Johnson drank immoderate quant.i.ties of tea. For this fact is regarded as unedifying and trivial, despite its actually infinite consequences, and despite the philosophical position that any and every fact embodies the entire mystery of the universe.

Alles Vergangliche Ist nur ein Gleichnis.

Even such a momentous fact as the discovery of printing by Gutenberg has acquired no mythological significance, for it lacks those special qualities which fire the imagination, which demand of the human mind that it recognize a revelation of the meaning behind the world.

This definition of myth is probably clear enough, even though many specialists in mythology may not altogether agree with it. The problem is much less clear when we come to consider how and why certain events, legends, or symbols acquire the status of myth. Still deeper is the problem of what, if anything, these myths ”really mean. I do not believe that we are anywhere near to a full understanding of the processes governing the formation of myth, of the rationale whereby the human mind selects some narratives as mythic in significance and others as simply historical or merely inconsequential. These processes are very largely unconscious. Only quite rarely do people, upon hearing or witnessing a narrative, say, This is obviously mythical because it clearly symbolizes our philosophical views about the meaning of the universe.” For many people who have myths have nothing very much in the way of philosophical views.

Moreover, many stories which become mythical bear no label which marks them as such. It is otherwise with the Christian stories, for the priests and prophets who first uttered them said, ”Thus saith the Lord”, and felt sincerely that they were not inventing idle tales but were in receipt of divine revelations-and there is no doubt that Jesus himself actually claimed some type of divine origin or affinity. But a great number of hero and fairy tales bear no such obvious stamp. In general, however, it would be safe to say that they are received as mythical because their events have a miraculous or ”numinous quality which marks them as special, queer, out of the ordinary, and therefore representative of the powers or Power behind the world.

But it is not at all easy to say why, at certain times, certain of these uncommon narratives, certain images and symbols, seem to embody the ”worldfeeling of immense numbers of people and to exercise such a compulsive and moving quality that men have the sense that life itself depends on their repet.i.tion and reenactment. Why, for instance, was the mind of Western man captured by the Christ,myth rather than the story of Mithras ? How is it that myths lose their power, and that, after flouris.h.i.+ng for centuries in Egypt and pa.s.sing over into Roman civilization, the myth of Isis and Osiris did not live on in Western Europe ? How is it, however, that the myth which becomes dominant retains some of the characteristics of the myth that wanes, that there are certain important resemblances between Osiris and Christ, Isis and the Virgin Mother?

This, of course, is inseparably bound up with the problem of what myths really mean-this is, if they do mean some/ thing and are not just ”natural growths” like flowers and fish.

Perhaps myths come out of the human mind in the same way that hair comes out of the human head. Now there have been many fas.h.i.+ons of opinion among those who claim to interpret myths scientifically. Anthropologists of the era and school of Sir James Frazer inclined to the view that the significance of myths was either astro_rmical~ etative, or s.e.xual-a view that still carries a great deal of weight. Myths were held to be naive explanations of the behaviour of the heavenly bodies, of the mysterious forces governing the growth of plants, crops, and cattle, or of the entrarncing powers behind s.e.xual love and generation. With the development of more sophisticated theological and philosophical ideas, these explanations under, went transformations which frequently involved a change of the mystery being explained-as the mind of man conceived the powers in question to be more than the sun, the crops, and the feeling of love themselves. In other words, the actual stories remained, but their meanings as well as the names of their central characters were changed to fit more mature ways of thinking.

While this theory probably accounts for some myths, there are several ways in which it is unsatisfactory. The older generation of anthropologists were always apt to see ”early” or primitive man in terms of the a.s.sumption that intelligence began with the Greeks and reached a fulfilment in Western Europe-in comparison with which all other cultures were in relative darkness and superst.i.tion. They therefore invented an idea of ”primitive man as a being whose total intelligence was supposed to consist in some rudimentary fumblings towards the kind of wisdom monopolized by Western civilization. Hardly dreaming that there are other-and highly developed-types of intelligence and wisdom, as well as different life,goals, than those contemplated by Western man, these anthropologists found only what their prejudices enabled them to see. Their premise was that their own culture as the ”latest in time represented the height of evolution. Earlier to Myth and Ritual in Christianity cultures must therefore be elementary forms of modern culture, and their degree of civilization and intelligence had to be estimated by the degree to which their values approximated to modern values.

Thus we still speak of certain peoples as primitive and ”backward because they do not care to rush about the earth at immense speeds, to acc.u.mulate more possessions than they can possibly enjoy, to annihilate all peace and silence of the mind with an incessant stream of verbiage from newspaper or radio, or to live like sardines in the din and the fumes of great cities. It seems to have escaped our imagination that evolution and progress have occurred in quite other directions than these. In short, these socalled early and primitive cultures were not so stupid as we like to think, and th ;ir mythologies may have had purposes quite other than attempts to solve the special problems in which our own science is interested.

We should therefore consider two other theories of myth, the first of which derives from the researches of the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. Stated simply, his theory is that myth originates in dream and spontaneous fantasy, rather than in any deliberate attempt to explain anything. This is based on the discovery that the dreams and free fantasies of thousands of modern patients contain the same motifs, patterns, and images as ancient mythologies, and that very frequently they arise without any previous knowledge of these ancient materials. For this Jung has an explanation which is much more simple and direct than his terminology suggests at first acquaintance. His theory of the origination of myth in the Collective Unconscious sounds highly speculative and ”mystical”, for which reason it is unpopular among lovers of scientific objectivity.

For the Collective Unconscious is not some kind of trans. cendental ghost permeating all human beings. Consider the human body. At all times and in all places it a.s.sumes the same general shape and structure, and it does not surprise us in the least that men born today in New York have the same bone/ formation as men born four thousand years ago in Mohenjoi daro. Furthermore, the bone/formation, as well as the complex structure of respiration, circulation, digestion, and the entire nervous/system, was not designed by us consciously. It just grows, and we have only the vaguest notions of bow it grows. And the physical structure of a physioichemist grows neither more nor less efficiently than that of an illiterate peasant. Thus the material form of man is collective in the sense of common to all men, since men-by definition-are creatures which have just this form. The process by which this form develops is unconscious-and thus the Collective Unconscious is simply a name for this process which is both unconscious and common to all men.

Extreme differences in the human form are largely the result of some conscious interference with this process, as when Ubangi women stretch their lips around wooden disks. But when one leaves the shaping of the body to the unconscious process, a body grown in Africa remains in all general respects just like a body grown in America. a.s.suming that thoughts, feelings, ideas, and images are either parts of the human body, or functions thereof, or at least activities shaped by the same process-one would expect to find the same collective or common character when thoughts and images are allowed to develop without conscious interference, as in dreams and spontaneous fantasy. This would give us an explanation both reasonable and simple for the fact that myths ”dreamed up” five thousand years ago in Chaldea are in essential respects like those found three thousand years later in Mexico or today in London or Los Angeles .l If Jung's theory is correct, does it tell us anything about the significance of myth? Jung believes that he has very strong One can account in the same way for the common character of logical thinking. It is evident to both a Greek philosopher and an Indian pandit that two and two make four because the structure of the brain is common to both.

ra Myth and Ritual in Christianity evidence for the fact that dreams and fantasies are symptoms of the directions being taken by unconscious psychological processes. In other words, they enable a psychiatrist to diagnose a psychological condition of health or disease in the same way that feeling the pulse, making a blood count, or taking a urinalysis enables a physician to test the general health of the body. From this comes a further idea of immense importance.

So far as bodily health is concerned, we estimate ”health by a collective or normal standard. That is to say, a man is healthy if his unconscious physical processes work without special interference, enabling him to survive without undue pain to the greatest age which seems attainable by any large number of human beings. Furthermore, the healing work of a physician is usually a matter of helping unconscious processes of the body to accomplish a resistance to disease in which they are already engaged-with immense ingenuity. Not unreasonably, Jung has transposed this into psychological terms. He believes that the psychiatrist heals most effectively when he helps mental processes which are similarly unconscious, formative, healing, and common to all men. This has led him to trust and respect the wisdom of the psychological Unconscious, just as physicians trust the ingenious wisdom of the body.

What is particularly interesting for our purposes, however, is his contention that the dreams and fantasies of psychologically healthy people tend to resemble the general form of those great collective myths which underlie the spiritual and religious traditions of the race. For example, he finds that in the final stages of psychological healing patients will dream or produce in fantasy the image of a quartered circle or mandala under an enormous variety of particular forms. Strangely enough, mythological traditions as widely different as the Christian and the Buddhist use types of this circle or mandala image to represent their different notions of fulfilment-famous instances of the Christian mandala being the rosewindows in Gothic cathedrals and the vision of G.o.d in Dante's Paradiso.

The general implication of Jung's theory is, then, that the great collective myths in some way represent the healing and formative work of man's unconscious psychological processes, which he must learn to trust, respect, and aid in his conscious thought and action. With a few changes in terminology, there is nothing in this theory which should be objectionable to a Christian of almost any variety. I have stated the theory in its most physical farm, but since no one has now any very clear notions as to what physical or material things are, or whether such words mean anything at all, it would not be stretching things too far to equate the ”wisdom” of the Unconscious with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit-always provided that we are not too c.o.c.ksure as to what the Holy Spirit may have in mind. ”For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isa. 55: -9) Jung's theory of myth is useful and highly suggestive so far as it goes, particularly in its explanation of the way in which myths are actually formed. Yet it leaves something to be desired in its actual interpretation of the symbols of myth, for the final ”meaning” which emerges is a life theory, a psychological philosophy, which is Jungs own personal hypothesis, despite the fact that it contains a number of universal and time, honoured elements. I feel that a still deeper light has been thrown upon the whole nature of myth by one of the most learned and unaiversal,minded scholars of our time- the late Ananda Coomaraswamy, for many years curator of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Coomaraswamy represented an increasingly growing school of mythological and anthropological thought which has outgrown the provincialism of the nineteenth century, and has ceased to equate wisdom, progress, and culture with the peculiar abnormalities and agitations of the modern West. Since h.o.m.o sapiens has probably inhabited this earth for something 14 Myth and Ritual in Christianity like a million years, it is rather rash to suppose that culture is a relatively recent phenomenon. Ananda Coomaraswamy has ably shown that extremely sophisticated and profound cultures have existed quite apart from the special types of apparatus which we think essential-such as writing, building in brick or stone, or the employment of machinery. Obviously, such cultures will neither pursue nor attain the life.goals which we consider important, but will have other goals out of all relation to the peculiar desires and ”goods of modern man.